Electronic mail (email) is now one of the most preferred forms of communications. It seems individuals and enterprises are always available via email 24-7. Moreover, a wide swath of the population is now email literate and now has access to the Internet. That is, email is now widely popular with a variety of income groups, age groups, ethnicity groups, and the like. Consequently, email has become particularly attractive form of communication for enterprises. In fact, customers of enterprises may be more likely to accept email communication than to receive regular postal mail communication.
Generally, enterprises that use email in any significant way as a form of customer communication will employ some automated services to customize emails to particular customers or customer segments and to mass deliver those emails. This makes email communication even more attractive because very little human resources are required to process customer communications.
However, a few problems do exist with automated email services. For example, suppose an enterprise's email server fails while an email request was being sent to an external email server. In such a case, the enterprise may believe the email was never delivered, when in fact the email was delivered by the external email server to the intended recipient. In the same example, the enterprise may believe the email did get sent during the failure since it appears as being sent, when in fact the email may have never been delivered to the intended recipient.
Determining whether an email was sent or not sent can have significant implications on the enterprise. For instance, legal obligations may require that recipients receive certain legal disclaimers or documents from an enterprise and if the enterprise believes they were sent, when in fact they were not sent, then the enterprise may have to endure fines or produce good faith evidence that it believed the disclaimers or documents were sent to the recipients. In either case, the enterprise has to disrupt normal business processing to correct the problems; this consumes resources and may result in unexpected expenses by way of any fines levied.
In another example, the enterprise may annoy a customer if the customer receives multiple emails of the same subject matter or if the customer fails to receive an expected or beneficial email. This situation may be even more detrimental to the long term health of an enterprise than the potential legal implications because valued customers may be lost or may become disloyal to the enterprise.
As a result of these problems with traditional email processing, some more astute and concerned enterprise put a variety of manual checks in place to confirm emails were in fact sent and sent once. Unfortunately, this consumes human resources and is time consuming and not efficient for an enterprise that is relying on email technology to streamline its customer communications.
Thus, it can be seen that improved email processing techniques are desirable.